January 26, 2015

He's in the family room, half dozing over his evening scotch. He's feeling pleasantly sluggish from the football game and the beer. His team won. Now the kids are watching their latest favorite show. He's not paying attention, hears the voices drift in and out. Some silly sci-fi something. Some group of quirky, not quite normal eccentrics, out to save the world. Snatches of dialog drift in.

He snaps awake. The memory comes back. The one that has mystified him all these years. Oh my god! They're real! I met them!

****

It was 2000. I'd gotten one of those Marriott timeshare offers -- 5 nights in a deluxe villa near Disneyworld for some ridiculously cheap price. The only catch was that before you left you had to sit through the hour-long sales pitch. Why not? We like Disneyworld. We'd bring Marian along. We'd be polite during the pitch. Hell, maybe we'd even buy in after all (this was just before we found Lynn's dreamhouse).

The villas were quite nice and the vacation was lovely. By the time we entered the sales office on the morning of our departure we were in a mellow mood. We weren't inclined to buy, but we were willing to have them try. It was all relaxed and low-key. First a video, then we sat down with the very nice, professional agent. He asked us questions about our likes and dislikes, trying to sort out which of his categories to slot us into. No, we didn't golf or ski. No watersports. More interested in cities than mountains or beaches. He flipped through the album of pictures of the various properties.

He started to talk about financing options, but Lynn stopped him. "If we do this, we'll probably just pay cash." An eyebrow went up. We could see him mentally recalibrating.

So do you travel much? Quite a bit, actually. And is that for business or pleasure? A pretty even mix of both.

And what do you like to do when you're traveling?

"Have lunch," said Lynn. He looked confused. I elaborated, "If it's a day when neither of us is working, we'll sleep late and then try to find a nice place for a leisurely lunch. Then maybe a bit of sightseeing or a museum. Find an interesting restaurant for dinner and then maybe a local dive bar for drinks and some live music. That'd be kind of a perfect day."

I could see that we weren't making this easier for him. "So where have you been in the last year?"

November 21, 2014

That was Greg's "if you take just one thing from this session" recommendation. Howard agreed, but added, "...equally promote having your researchers submit their funder information when submitting manuscripts for journal publication. Having the Researcher ID and Funder ID together married up to the article DOI is a powerful combination."

On the other hand, just having Howard & Greg chatting together on the same stage was a pretty powerful combination. When SHARE & CHORUS were first launched, just a few months after the Holdren memo was released, many observers saw them as competitive. In this corner, the publishing lobby making a policy end run to try to maintain their market dominance; and in this corner the combined might of the research libraries and universities seeking to leverage their investments in institutional repositories into some greater relevance. Which of these mutually exclusive solutions would the federal funding agencies settle on? (Or would PMC simply vacuum everything up into an expansive PubScience Central)?

Fortunately, it didn't take too long for the developers to see where the projects overlapped and where there were advantages to be gained for both projects by sharing expertise and perspectives. By the time I had lunch with several of my Roundtable colleagues at the AAAS meeting last February those conversations had gotten to the point where a joint appearance at Charleston was starting to look like a real possibility. I immediately thought of Greg as a potential participant. He's a Charleston regular and has been working with SHARE as a consultant. Turns out that he had been having discussions with Judy Ruttenberg about a similar panel proposal and when the Charleston directors got wind of all this, they put us together.

Bringing Howard in was a natural given his role with CHOR., and I wanted to include John Vaughn, whose experiences with handling scholarly commnications issues for the AAU go back many years, and whose roles in chairing the Roundtable and in helping to develop the SHARE concept have amply demonstrated his commitment to including the views of all stakeholders in working through these very complicated issues.

The concept that Greg & Judy were developing was broader than just SHARE & CHORUS, however, and when the three of us spoke by phone over the summer we agreed on the necessity of bringing in a data person. We were very fortunate that Laurie Goodman, editor-in-chief of Gigascience, was able to join us.

I've done several sessions like this over the years -- "facilitated conversation". No presentations. Some informal agreement among the participants about the likely themes. I prepare half a dozen or so questions ahead of time, but once we get to the event, I rarely use more than two. With the right people, the conversation flows naturally and takes its own course. My job is just to keep it moving.

With this group, my task was extremely easy and the 45 minutes went by in a flash. Of course we could have gone on much longer, but I'm happy with the range of topics that we were at least able to touch on. (The session was recorded, so there will be a link on the Charleston website at some point).

One of the most striking moments was when Greg asked how many in the audience were involved in managing institutional repositories. Half the people raised a hand. Then he said, "Keep your hands up. Now how many of you are successful in getting your authors to submit directly to your IR?" Only 2 hands were left up and one of the two was wavering in uncertainty.

Reshaping the scholarly communication eco-system is a massive job. As John said, developing achievable policy will require adult deliberations and negotiations among all the key players – universities, libraries, publishers, and government. It is also clear that a focused effort in data access and interpretation, management, and preservation will become increasingly important, and is one of the areas that currently is both most volatile and most challenging.

So in addition to promoting ORCID, noting funding sources, sharing best practices for effective IR management, and a whole host of other things that came up during the session, John suggests getting one of the nifty yellow Data t-shirts like the one Laurie wore. Cafe Press has some nice options.

September 01, 2014

"Effective September 8, I'll be Director of Digital Data Curation Strategies reporting to the office of the Provost." I've started sending this announcement around to the discussion lists, alerting the far-flung professional network to my change in circumstance.

There's been a nice assortment of congratulations and well-wishes. But what has surprised me have been the comments from people who assume that this means they won't see me at the usual library conferences anymore. What? I'm still a medical librarian. I'm still a member of MLA & SCMLA & MCMLA & ALHeLA. I won't be representing UAB at the AAHSL meetings anymore, it's true, but I'll continue to go to the other conferences. And given the increasing importance of data curation at research institutions I expect to be more involved with the work of some of my librarian colleagues rather than less.

Lynn reminds me that she went through a similar thing 25 years ago when she left UAB to work for EBSCO. She had to work very hard to get people to understand that she was no less of a librarian just because she was no longer working in a traditional library job. I guess I'll have to do the same thing.

John Meador, most recently Dean of Libraries at SUNY-Binghamton, picked up the reins as UAB Dean of Libraries August 5. The challenge he has accepted is to merge the two existing library organizations -- Lister Hill and Mervyn H. Sterne -- into a single organization serving the entire university community. Unlike some recent reorganizations (UNC & Florida come to mind), UAB's roots as a primarily biomedical research institution offers some unique opportunities. The two libraries are similar in size of staff and budget, are located just a few blocks from each other on a compact urban campus, and serve an increasingly multidisciplinary institution. So while services will continue to be delivered from both buildings, we anticipate that, over time, a single, seamless organization will be formed to provide those services.

It's a bit of a conceptual leap because even though most of the important work that librarians do now takes place outside of the building, we still think of the library organization and the library building as occupying the same space. As I was trying to explain the goals of the merger to a faculty member he said, "But the biomedical literature will still be based at Lister Hill, won't it?" I had to tell him, gently, "Actually, since we spend less than 1% of our content budget on print, that hasn't been the case for five years now." The reference librarians do far more of their work by chat, email, phone, webinar, office hours in classroom buildings, or meetings & workshops around campus than they do in person in the building. The building is still very important, of course, but basing the organization on the physical limitations of the building is an anachronism.

One consequence of the merger is that the two Director positions go away. The Director, Lister Hill and Director, Mervyn Sterne functioned as deans, although we didn't have that title. But we met as part of the Deans Council and had the same level of budgetary and personnel authority as the deans. Now that there is a single individual with the title, as well as the authority, of Dean, those two director positions are superfluous.

So what has opened up for me turns out to be quite marvelous. Every research institution in the country is trying to figure out how to effectively manage research data. What services should the institution provide? How do you effectively manage security? How do you establish policies and monitor compliance with the full range of increasingly complex federal requirements? How do you make data available for reuse in clean and well-structured contextualized environments?

A number of institutions have made some headway in sorting this out, but part of the challenge is that there isn't really a single entity within the modern research university that is the logical home for the full range of issues that need to be addressed and coordinated. It requires true collaboration among the libraries, IT, the research office and the various pockets of excellence and expertise that exist across the campus -- often unknown to each other.

My task, for the next several months, will be to map what exists at UAB, to figure out who is doing what, to identify where there are significant gaps, and then to work with all of the various players to help develop strategies for pulling all of the pieces together into a coordinated whole. From this vantage point it looks ridiculously complex.

January 31, 2014

Later this month I’ll be speaking at the AAAS meeting on this topic. Although I know what the positions of our library organizations are, and what some individual librarians might think, I’ve never felt that I had a good grasp of what librarians in general think. I suspect the range of opinion is pretty wide. So I’ve come up with a list 15 statements that people can indicate their level of agreement with. They're the sort of statements one reads and hears in presentations, blogs and discussion lists. In some cases they may be too broad or simplistic for simple agreement or disagreement so I’ve included a comment block that people can use to amplify their answers or explain why they can’t agree or disagree with the statement as written.

I don’t expect to draw any general conclusions from this, but I hope that it will be useful in illustrating some of the breadth of opinion that exists in the library community. I'll post a summary of the results here.

The survey shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to complete – although you can certainly take longer, depending on how much you choose to comment.

And, of course, if there are other things you think I should be telling the AAAS audience about what librarians think, I'd love to hear about it.

July 19, 2011

It seemed as if the unstated subtext of most of the conferences & meetings I went to this spring was that the boundaries between publishers and librarians is getting increasingly porous. Geoff Bilder made it explicit in his plenary session at the MLA meeting when he referred to a presentation that John Unsworth gave at the Society for Scholarly Publishing meeting several years ago titled, "Pubrarians and Liblishers: New Roles for Old Foes." Increasingly, librarians are starting to move into the publishing space and publishers are worrying about things that used to be the exclusive domain of librarians.

Despite this, we're still too often talking past each other, or not talking at all. We need more conversation. Which is why one of the most enjoyable things I did was the SSP "Chat With A Librarian" roundtables. Jean's done a good writeup of the event for the SSP website. The room was packed and ninety minutes flew by. We could easily have gone on longer.

Jean and I, along with Norm Frankel, will be using some of the feedback from that session to develop the Chicago Collaborative's "Libraries 101" modules, designed to present the broad array of library issues to people in publishing. The evidence of the SSP session is that many people in publishing are very hungry for more information about how libraries really operate and what librarians really want.

Anything that can foster more conversation will help. As those boundaries continue to become even more porous we're going to need the expertise of everybody involved in the scholarly communication chain more than ever.

March 30, 2010

Every piece of writing should tell a story. This is as true for a report for my boss (like the update on our investigations into the impact of journal cancellations that I need to get done this week), as it is for an essay that I may be preparing for print, or a tale about Josie that I post here. Same thing for any kind of a presentation that I might do for a conference: What's the plot? Who are the characters? Where's the dynamic tension? How do I want the audience to feel when they've come to the end?

I have lots of stories to work on in the next few months:

In two weeks I'm doing a presentation on open access for the annual meeting of the NCRR/SEPA program directors. My assignment is to take 10-12 minutes to discuss what open access journals are, why SEPA PIs should be interested in publishing in them, and any other advice I have about "publishing in open access journals or publishing in general." To do this adequately in the time allotted is practically impossible. Approaching it as a story helps to keep the presentation concise and on track, rather than just a scattering of semi-related facts.

The editor of the JMLA asked me to write a guest editorial for the January 2011 October 200910 issue. I'm quite thrilled about this since the editorials that I wrote while I was running the thing include some of the best writing that I've ever done, and I've missed having that challenge. I'm going to use the opportunity to write about the experience of participating in the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable. The report stands on its own and we've been pleased with the reception that it's gotten, but what I'm interested in relating in the editorial is what it was like on the inside -- as far as I'm aware, the Roundtable was the only occasion during all of the smoke and thunder surrounding the open access discussions of the past decade or so that a group of stakeholders covering the range of views that we did was brought together to have the kinds of intense discussions that we did. There ought to be more of that.

I promised Flannery that I'd work with BtheA on an article about medical humanities for the theme issue of the JMLA that he's putting together. I'm far, far behind on the original schedule that I'd set for that, although I do have a pretty good sense of how I want to approach it. The tension between the need to educate physicians for the science and to try to help them become fully rounded human beings at the same time remains unresolved, and I'd like to dig a bit into the issues surrounding that tension.

In June I'll be in San Francisco as part of a panel presenting at the annual SSP meeting. My brief for this is to talk about budgets in libraries -- the things that publishers don't necessarily know or think about. The panel comes out of the efforts of the Chicago Collaborative, part of our range of education activities designed to bring librarians and publishers to a greater understanding of the challenges and issues that each other faces. In this case, the story that I want to tell has to do with the varied ways in which libraries get funded, the multiplicity of priorities that are always jostling for resources, the gradual shifting in how library directors are thinking about allocating those resources -- and what that might mean for publishers.

July takes me to the annual CESSE meeting in Pittsburgh to talk about open access, public access, and the various issues that the Roundtable occupied itself with. Until I got the invitation, I didn't know that CESSE existed, but it's no surprise since there is an association for everything. It's possible that I'll have crossed paths with some of these folks at other meetings, but I do particularly like going to meetings that are outside of my usual orbit. Librarians spend too much time talking amongst themselves. They need to get out more.

And then there's the Doe Lecture. I don't actually give that until May of next year, and don't need to have it ready to send to the JMLA editor for a month or two after that, but I've started to think about the story arc for it. As I've remarked to a number of people, while I've had the opportunity to do many interesting and valuable things with the Medical Library Association, the only two things I ever really wanted to do were to edit the Bulletin (back when it was the Bulletin rather than the Journal) and to someday give the Doe Lecture. It means a great deal to me that I'm going to have that chance.

All of these stories, of course, are variations on the same themes -- the radical changes occurring in the realm of scholarly communication and the tremendous opportunities that they present for librarians. The tale unfolds in the telling. As always, when I'm looking ahead to a presentation or a piece of writing, I'm eager to find out what I'm going to say.

February 09, 2010

Charlie points to the list of publishers who've agreed to hold prices at 2009 levels and appears to speculate that we may be seeing an end to the historical trend of significant annual price increases for STM journals. But it remains to be seen what the impact of those pricing pledges actually turns out to be -- much of that depends on the choices that librarians make. Will those publishers be rewarded with a disproportionately smaller number of cancellations from those libraries struggling to deal with reduced acquisitions budgets? Or as librarians scramble to find the funds to maintain the big packages from the publishers that they love to hate, will it be the "good guys" who end up getting screwed?

For many years, Library Journal has published, each April, an eagerly anticipated article by Lee Van Orsdel and Kathleen Born analyzing pricing trends in the scholarly journal market. Kathleen retired last year, and the article has been taken over by a new team. As it happens, I had dinner with them a couple of weeks ago. They were just beginning to crunch the data, so our conversation was entirely speculative, but we spent quite a bit of time talking about where the cancellations were likely to fall and what the impact on the overall market would be.

Based on the informal conversations I have with my colleagues, I suspect that Elsevier is going to come through this year just fine, despite that fact that they continue to be aggressive in their pricing. "We can't cancel ScienceDirect," is the refrain that I hear constantly. I remember a conversation that I had with an ARL director who said that if she threatened to cancel, the sales rep would start calling her faculty and getting them to put pressure on her. She wasn't going to risk that. (When our sales rep suggested to the woman who does content management for us that he was going to start contacting our faculty about our proposed cuts she offered to send him a copy of our phone directory. I think she confuses him.)

If the titles in the big packages are the ones that you generally believe are more important for your community than those put out by the publishers on the "good guy" list, then you should by all means keep those titles. And if that means that the small publishers who are hanging in by the skin of their teeth and holding prices in response to the pleas of librarians are the ones who get whacked, that's just the way it goes. You've got to do what's best for your faculty, right?

But I don't think I've ever heard a librarian make that argument. What I do hear is the fear that the faculty will rise up and... and.... Well, that part's never quite clear, but I think some library directors have visions of wild-eyed faculty members surrounding the library with pitchforks and torches.

We stepped away from the big packages last year. And yes, we had many faculty (57) who contacted us expressing concern about the loss of access to some titles. Most of those we reinstated. The conversations in almost all cases were respectful, thoughtful and extremely beneficial to us in getting a better handle on what was being used and why (we did have one rather agitated faculty member who I had to talk down from the ledge).

We're going through a similar process this year, although since we've already gotten out of the package deals, the potential loss of access is much smaller, although the titles are certainly more valuable to the community. And again, the engagement with the community has been excellent. Not a pitchfork in sight.

I don't know how this is going to unfold in the long run, but I'm certainly more eager than in any previous year to see what trends show up in the LJ article. I worry about the impact of these cuts on the teaching & research missions of my university (we're going to be holding a series of focus groups later this spring to try to get more detail on that), but I'm also enjoying the conversations with faculty that this crisis is giving rise to. And although I fear that we're not spending enough money to really meet the demonstrated needs, I know that the money we are spending is being spent better than ever before.

We've been meeting with each of the health sciences deans to be sure they've got all of the details about our budget situation, what we're doing and why, so they can handle any questions they get from their faculty and so they can alert us to concerns that they have. The discussions have been great -- these are smart people, who care deeply about the importance of library resources, but also understand the practical difficulties of managing large organizations with greatly diminished resources. They've got our back.

At the end of each meeting, as we're standing up to go, I've said, "Y'know, when I can step away from my anxiety about the potential negative impacts that our decisions are having, we're actually having a lot of fun. It's pushing us to be more creative and connected to what the community is doing. This really is the greatest time to be a librarian in 500 years."

January 21, 2010

"It can look like the most archaic institution of all. Yet its past bodes well for its future, because libraries were never warehouses of books. They have always been and always will be centers of learning. Their central position in the world of learning makes them ideally suited to mediate between the printed and the digital modes of communication."

This, from the introduction to Robert Darnton's The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future.

I've been a fan of Darnton's ever since reading The Great Cat Massacre many years ago. As a historian with an annales disposition, he has done some of the most interesting and useful work on the history of the book and printing and the way they have affected society and the diffusion of knowledge of anyone in the past fifty years. As an innovator and experimenter (he founded the Gutenberg-e program), he has taken what he's learned from all of that scholarly work and looked for ways to apply it in shaping the intellectual infrastructure of the 21st century. Now, as Director of the Harvard University Library, he is perfectly placed to assess the state of libraries and the convergence of print and digital.

Plus, he's a damn fine writer. I would put this book on the absolutely must read list for any librarian who actually wants to understand better why the question of "how do we make libraries relevant" is a complete hand-wringing red-herring waste of time.

Of course, it's a book. It's 206 pages (plus intro and index), and I know that a lot of the hip young techno (hand-wringing) librarians don't like to read books. They get everything they need from blogs and twitter. Look at it this way -- very few of Darnton's sentences are longer than 140 characters. Take a deep breath and pretend it's just a really long twitter feed. I know you can do it. Two evenings, max.

It's a collection of essays (most reworked somewhat) that he's written over a number of years, divided into three sections -- looking into the future, studying the present, and considering the past and the implications that our past has for our future. He has particularly insightful things to say about the Google Books settlement (agree with him or not, his arguments need to be considered), the advantages or disadvantages of electronic books, the importance of open access, and why the history of books matters.

Darnton is neither a technophile evangelist for the coming digital revolution, nor a grudging apologist for how it used to be "better". His long historical perspective puts him in the position of someone who is excited about what the new technologies can offer us without losing his understanding of the importance of what we've had in the past and what needs to be preserved as we move eagerly into the unknown future.

Librarians, and the institutions that they build, have always played a critical role in the advancement and preservation of learning and culture. Darnton's book helps to explain why that is even more the case now than ever.

August 27, 2008

Awhile back, I was sitting with a group of library directors discussing strategies for dealing with the difficult budget situations that we all find ourselves in this year. I was struck with how focused the rest of the folks in the room were on protecting the collections budget at all costs. It is emotional for them in a way that it isn't for me.

I certainly don't mean to suggest that I'm not worried about the impact of the cuts that we're going to make this year -- it's going to be substantial and it is going to have a serious impact on the community that I serve. But I am much more focused on the variety of services that we provide and making sure that we meet our commitment to getting people to the information that they need while helping them make appropriate and efficient use of it. This'll mean making greater use of ILL and being cleverer about taking advantage of the rapidly increasing amount of information that is freely available. I see no reason to shed tears over that.

But then, for me, the focus has always been on what librarians do, not what the library is.

In a way, the Ithaka report that is getting some attention in the blogosphere the last week or so makes the same point. The report points to a dramatic drop in the perception of faculty of the library's role as portal or gatekeeper between 2003 and 2006. In his comments on the report, Steven Bell asks, "But why are we only considering the role of the academic library as gateway, archive and buyer?" The answer seems pretty obvious to me -- it's because too many academic librarians are so focused on "the library" that they can't clear their thinking to see how our skills as information managers are becoming increasingly vital in helping people sort through this maddeningly complex information world in which we now live. As I've been saying for years the library is becoming less relevant, and no amount of hand-wringing over what we can do to get people to use the library more is going to change that. But librarians are more relevant than ever, if only we can disengage ourselves from privileging our buildings and collections the way that we do and utilizing our individual skills in more effective and relevant ways.

My institution was recently awarded a CTSA grant. This is an essential program for any institution that expects to be in the top tier of biomedical research in the future. As our Dean of Medicine expressed it, it clearly divides the biomedical research world into haves and have-nots. There is no more critical grant program for us right now. When the award was announced, a couple of our librarians went to talk to the PI to see what we can do to help. They didn't spend a lot time talking about the size of our collections. They talked about what we can do to help with the training of junior faculty, with efficiently connecting researchers to the latest sources of information, about helping to develop a robust, integrated informatics infrastructure. The PI did a presentation to the Deans council last week providing a full overview of the program and three times highlighted the fact that the libraries are involved, mentioning the librarians by name.

Yesterday I had a meeting with the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Programs and one of the senior faculty in our sociology department who works extensively with studying homeless populations. I'm interested in expanding some of our community engagement activities and seeing how we can get undergraduates more involved. By the time we finished the meeting we had the outlines of a couple of projects, one of which would involve getting some of the students from his medical sociology class looking at our GoLocal installation to help assess whether we are identifying the right resources and describing them in the ways that are most effective in connecting the homeless with the services that they need.

I could go on. The key here is that these are activities that are very high priority for my institution and what I am continually looking for are opportunities for us to apply our skills to help move those priorities forward. I've been saying it for so long now, it sounds trite to me, but our job is NOT to build a better library.

A number of years ago, at the Charleston Conference, I was having a conversation with a few very smart, very seasoned librarians. They were fussing about the future and worrying about what it would mean for them in a world where open access really does become predominant and traditional collection development is increasingly irrelevant. Their outlook was pretty bleak because, as one of them said, "Building collections is what librarians are all about!"

"No," I said. "Librarians are about getting people to the information they need in the most effective and efficient way possible. Building collections was just the means that we used to do that given the constraints of the print world."

The way I see it, the mission of librarians hasn't changed at all. But we're not going to fulfill it if we keep worrying about the future of libraries. There's way too much interesting and fun work to do to waste time on that.

He does an excellent job of describing the broad functions of publishing that I was clumsily alluding to in my post this morning (had I read his article sooner I could've saved myself some typing and just linked to it there). Part of what he describes so well, and which I wish that my librarian colleagues would get a better handle on, is just how various publishing is -- how different publishers can be from one another in their intent and their reach and their audience and their services, and how, as a consequence, whenever we make blanket statements about publishers they are invariably wrong or trivial.

His "nautilus model" for scholarly communication is, I have to say (just having returned from a trip to the UK), brilliant. It's clear, accurate, and provides a wonderful template for a much more nicely nuanced discussion of open access than we usually see. What is so refreshing about Esposito's discussion is that he clearly doesn't have an evangelical axe to grind either way -- he's just trying to figure out where open access might fit within the very broad spectrum of scholarly communication.

Do I agree with 100% of what he says in the article? Of course not. But hell, on any given day, I don't agree with myself 100%.